Month: October 2016

Enlarge / Road through Kamanaishi (credit: NOAA/NGDC, Patrick Fuller, IFRC.)

Recovery from a life-disrupting disaster presents challenges to everyone. But the elderly may struggle with difficulty in receiving appropriate medical care, isolation due to loss of social support networks, and trauma due to relocation after decades of having lived in the same place. Previous studies of natural disasters and seniors have not assessed how these challenges affect the elderly’s ability to function.

A recent paper published in PNAS showed that the degree to which housing was damaged due to the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami was associated with a cognitive decline in survivors who were 65 years old or older. This study is the first to suggest that life-disrupting disaster events may hasten the onset of dementia in the elderly.

The 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami caused housing damage and loss that displaced an estimated 340,000 residents of Japan. This event presented a unique “natural experiment,” in which researchers had access to a discrete population that had been exposed to the natural disaster. Researchers studied 3,594 elderly survivors who had participated in the Japan Gerontological Evaluation Study from the city of Iwanuma, approximately 80 kilometers from the epicenter of the earthquake. The researchers examined their health status, health behaviors, social determinants of healthy aging, and the dementia symptoms.

Enlarge / CenturyLink servers. (credit: CenturyLink)

CenturyLink today announced a deal to purchase Level 3 Communications in a merger that would give CenturyLink another 200,000 miles of fiber and make it a bigger player in the business network market. CenturyLink will reportedly pay $25 billion, and the deal is valued at $34 billion when accounting for the Level 3 debt that will be assumed by CenturyLink.

CenturyLink has nearly 6 million residential Internet customers in the US, but makes about 60 percent of its revenue selling network services to businesses. Level 3 sells only to businesses, and 76 percent of the combined company's revenue will come from business customers.

The companies hope to complete the merger by the third quarter of 2017. If approved by the Federal Communications Commission and other regulators, the deal will greatly expand CenturyLink's fiber footprint in the US and overseas.

Enlarge (credit: Oli Scarff/Getty Images)

Uber drivers have the same employment rights as other full-time employees in Britain, a court has ruled in a landmark decision which looks likely to send shockwaves through the nation's so-called "gig economy."

The ruling means that drivers are now entitled to earn the national minimum wage, holiday pay, sick pay, and other benefits, after the San Francisco-based taxi firm lost a case brought against them by two drivers backed by the GMB union. Uber had argued that it was a tech firm rather than a transport one, and that as its drivers were self-employed contractors it was not obliged to provide the kinds of statutory employment rights full-time workers would expect.

According to the GMB, the Central London Employment Tribunal's decision will have ramifications in other industries which rely on casualised labour, and that "similar contracts masquerading as bogus self employment will all be reviewed."

Enlarge / Android's home screen over the years, from all sorts of different form factors.

It's been more than two years since we originally ran Ron's epic 40,000-word history of the Android operating system, and in that time Android has continued to evolve and add version numbers. Ron has updated the piece with almost 11,000 additional words, bringing the history up to date with info on Kit-Kat, Lollipop, Marshmallow, Nougat, and Android Wear. If you'd like to jump directly to the new section, click right here (or, if you're a subscriber in single-page view, use this link instead).

Android has been with us in one form or another for more than eight years. During that time, we've seen an absolutely breathtaking rate of change unlike any other development cycle that has ever existed. When it came time for Google to dive in to the smartphone wars, the company took its rapid-iteration, Web-style update cycle and applied it to an operating system, and the result has been an onslaught of continual improvement. Lately, Android has even been running on a previously unheard of six-month development cycle, and that's slower than it used to be. For the first year of Android’s commercial existence, Google was putting out a new version every two-and-a-half months.

Looking back, Android's existence has been a blur. It's now a historically big operating system. Almost a billion total devices have been sold, and 1.5 million devices are activated per day—but how did Google get here? With this level of scale and success, you would think there would be tons of coverage of Android’s rise from zero to hero. However, there just isn’t. Android wasn’t very popular in the early days, and until Android 4.0, screenshots could only be taken with the developer kit. These two factors mean you aren’t going to find a lot of images or information out there about the early versions of Android.